Enric Miralles

12:00AM BST 04 Jul 2000

ENRIC MIRALLES, who has died aged 45, was appointed architect of the new Scottish Parliament in July 1998, three months before the legislation on devolution was passed at Westminster. The site of the new Parliament is at the foot of the Royal Mile against the spectacular backdrop of Arthur's Seat.

Miralles's design has been compared to an upturned boat of even lines and symmetrical curves. The debating chamber, in contrast to Westminster, was to be semi-circular - to suggest the non-adversarial nature of debate in Scotland. Miralles expounded his ideas confidently.

He was determined that his design should not be "polite"; his buildings, he said, were "always under construction". Donald Dewar, the Scottish Secretary, enthused about his "energy, imagination and creative approach". But the honeymoon period was shortlived. Bill Armstrong, project manager in the Scottish Office, resigned in 1999 amid rumours that costs were spiralling out of control.

And indeed by the beginning of 2000, estimates for the Parliament, originally £50 million, had reached £195 million and were still rising. Scottish sceptics, led by Margo Macdonald, believed it would be both cheaper and preferable to use the Church of Scotland's General Assembly Building on Calton Hill as their Parliament.

There was dissatisfaction, too, that Miralles continued to work from Barcelona, making only weekly or fortnightly visits to Edinburgh, and that he was also preoccupied with projects in Venice, Utrecht and Hamburg. Originally, it had been envisaged that the Edinburgh firm RMJM should be responsible for putting Miralles's ideas into practice; soon rumours were flying that they were bearing the lion's share of the work.

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Lord Steel of Aikwood, as presiding officer for the project, tried to hold the balance. But his task was not made any easier when it emerged that Miralles meant to demolish Queensberry House, a fine 17th-century building, which he reportedly described as "worse than a ruin". Many Scots began to wonder if this bohemian-looking Catalan was quite the man for the job.

Enric Miralles Moya was born on February 12 1955. He played a season of league basketball in Barcelona before attending the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura. As a teenager, he visited Edinburgh to brush up his English; and the Edinburgh architect William Adam would later become the starting point of his doctoral thesis at Columbia University, New York. He then set up practice in Barcelona with his first wife.

Miralles claimed to have been influenced by Le Corbusier, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Antonio Gaudi. His most striking early buildings included the Igualada cemetery outside Barcelona, Takaoka railway station in Japan, the sports centre at Huesca in Aragon and the balletic Eurythmics Centre at Alicante. One critic characterised these structures as "lithe, fluid, and almost breathing things of sloping walls, complex fragments and inter-penetrating spaces" with a "romantic, almost shaggy look".

For the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, Miralles designed the archery pavilions, and this was followed by a new town hall in Utrecht. After the Edinburgh job was announced, it emerged that the roof had collapsed on a sports hall that Miralles had designed. It was, in fact, the builders' fault, but it did not inspire confidence when a critic praised Miralles for creating "distorted and broken forms that seem on the verge of collapse".

Miralles himself preferred to live in "second-hand places, places in whose creation you haven't participated, and to play the role of observer". His own home spread round four sides of a courtyard in Barcelona's Barrio Gotico, with a palm tree growing in the middle.

Interviewers found him an engaging and opinionated conversationalist, one minute discussing Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf, the next enthusing about the "amazing" English bread and butter - or musing about the incomprehensibility of Scottish porridge.

Enric Miralles's first marriage was dissolved. He then married, in 1992, Benedetta Tagliabue, an Italian-born architect with whom he also shared his practice; they had twins.